I Lost Seven Pounds in One Day. From Cheese.

Seven pounds.

One day.

Cheese.

I'm not going to make it prettier than it was. I ate something my body decided it was done with, and for the next 24 hours I was in the bathroom every single hour. On the hour. Like a train schedule.

And I had a full day I couldn't cancel.

What I did

I showed up.

Not heroically. Not with a speech. I showed up, I did the thing, I walked out, I came back, and I did the next thing.

Every hour the same choice. Quit, or get back in the room.

I got back in the room every time. By the end of the day I was seven pounds lighter and I'd kept every commitment I'd made.

That's it. That's the whole story.

Why I'm telling you this

Because this is what resilience actually looks like, and nobody wants to post about it.

Everybody loves the resilience story with a mountain in it. The comeback. The big loss and the bigger win. I've got those too. I ran a company through 2008 and I'll tell that story all day.

But that's not where resilience gets built. It gets built on a Tuesday when something small and stupid goes wrong and you don't let it decide your day.

The owners who make it through the big stuff are the ones who've been practicing on the small stuff for years.

The man in the arena

Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech in 1910 that every operator should read once a year. The line everyone knows is about the man in the arena, the one whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

What people skip is the part right before it. He says the critic doesn't count. The person who points out where the strong man stumbled doesn't count.

I think about that line a lot, and not because of the critics.

Because the strong man stumbles. That's in the speech. Stumbling is part of being in the arena. The only people who never stumble are the ones who never walked in.

What this has to do with your company

You're going to have cheese days.

Not the dramatic ones. The dumb ones. The key employee who quits by text. The payment that bounces the morning of payroll. The software that goes down during the demo.

None of those are the test. The test is whether you get back in the room on the hour, every hour, until the day is done.

• Keep the commitment even when the version of you that made it feels like a different person.
• Don't narrate the suffering. Nobody in the room needs to know. Do the work and go.
• Count it. Seven pounds, 24 hours, every commitment kept. Resilience you don't measure doesn't compound.
• Practice on the small days so the big days feel like a day.